The Magicians

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The Magicians by Lev Grossman is billed as a more adult version of Harry Potter. And while the first 3rd of the book does indeed meet that billing, the book is so much more and yet so much less. The Magicians follows Harry Potter Quentin Coldwater, a teenager who obsesses over Narnia Fillory, a magical land described in a book series. Quentin stumbles into a college exam that turns out to be so much more. It’s a test of magic and if you pass you can attend Hogwarts Brakebills, a magical college.

As you could guess, Quentin passes and he leaves his friends and attends Brakebills. At Brakebills, the students are taught magic. There is the usual group of students and activities in the college. Quentin flourishes and learns magic. Arguably the best part of this section of the book is the exam, which is a cross between The Goblet of Fire and Bear Grylls. Then the book changes and becomes a slacker novel.

Quentin, his friends and other recent graduates go out into the real world and try to find their way. They are confused, angry and generally not sure what they are going to do with their lives. After many nights of drinking, fighting and having sex (sometimes all at one time), the plot twist is upon us. Fillory is real. A friend of the group comes back with that information and shows them how to go there (through an intermediate world). Here the book takes a Narnia turn and the group goes to deal with events in Fillory.

While the book is enjoyable (Lev Grossman does a great job writing it), I had a few issues with it. First the book felt like a trilogy compressed into 400 pages. The book length meant that each section felt a little rushed in some places. One example is Quentin’s friend Julia. Julia was Quentin’s unrequited love interest in high school. During a visit home, he finds out that she was in the exam for Brakebills at the same time he was. And even though her memory of the event was supposed to erased, she can still remember enough and it’s driving her crazy. After bringing this character back, there is a mention that Quentin told the Brakebills staff and they would take care of it. After that there is no mention of her for the rest of the book. It feels incomplete and extremely rushed. There seems to be no reason to bring her back if she is going to be disposed off (off screen) a few pages later with no effect on the characters or the plot.

I would recommend the book for anyone who loved Harry Potter (or Narnia), but was left slightly disappointed and felt this book could be so much more. 


A look back (and forward) at Jasper Fforde

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Jasper Fforde has a new book out, Shades of Grey, which isn’t tied in with either of his previous series (Thursday Next or Nursery Crime). While I hope to review this book in the next few weeks, I thought I’d take a look back at his previous books:

The Thursday Next series consists of 5 books: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rottenand First Among Sequels. The books follow the continuing adventures of Thursday Next, an English woman who works for as a literary detective. The job of a literary detective is varied and interesting. Thursday is called upon to enter books, rescue people, keep literary characters in their place (they occasionally wander off to other books or try to change their actions from what was originally in the plot) among other tasks. Thursday is aided by her boyfriend/fiance/husband Landon (who gets deleted from the timeline at one point), her father who is a renegade Chrono Corps (protects the timeline) agent, her aunt and uncle Polly and Mycroft Next and her pet dodo Pickwick.

The books are very heavy into literature jokes (Charles Dickens and Charolotte Bronte are frequent targets) and fantastic interactions between literary characters. Time travel (and time travel paradoxes) play a big part in the series as well.  Thursday gains the ability to enter novels and help mediate conflicts and spends a vacation in an unpublished book Caversham Heights(which ties into the Nursery Crime books). The first four books makeup one storyline and First Among Sequels starts a new series (with a new book expected in 2011).

Overall the books are wonderfully funny, with characters from all over interacting in different scenarios. Fforde handles it all with ease. Having said that, the earlier books are much better than the later ones. I was slightly disappointed by First Among Sequels, but not enough to resist reading the new books when they come out.

The Nursery Crime books (The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear) follow the adventures of Detective Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crimes Division. In the The Big Over Easy, Jack gets a new partner (Mary Mary) and investigates the death of Humpty Dumpty. In The Fourth Bear, Jack and Mary investigate a missing Goldilocks, a porridge smuggling scheme and the elusive Fourth Bear who might link both of them. Caversham Heights, the fictional, unpublished novel from the Thursday Next universe and the plot is extremely similar to The Big Over Easy.

What the Thursday Next books do for literature, the Nursery Crime books do for nursery rhymes. All of the characters are all treated as real and the crimes committed are investigated as a detective novel. They are written as straight detective novels with the humor comes from the scenes and character interactions more than slapstick or funny lines.

The new book, Shades of Grey, looks to follow Fforde’s satirical bent into a new direction. The blurbs make it sound closer to the Thursday Next series only more of a technology direction instead of literature.

This post is part of the thread: Thursday Next – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Books not worth full review

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  • Under the Dome by Stephen King is a typical Stephen King book. Truthfully, I haven’t enjoyed a Stephen King book since the first 3/4 of It. And a book that copies a plot from a cartoon movie is about what you expect it to be. It wasn’t so bad that I wanted to put it down and it wasn’t so good that I was looking forward to what happened next. I skipped a few pages here and there to get to the end and didn’t miss a thing.
  • Enemies & Allies by Kevin J Anderson isn’t as bad as his The Last Days of Krypton, but that’s not saying much. Batman and Superman fight Lex Luthor during the Cold War. If you’re a huge Batman/Superman fan then it’s worthwhile. Otherwise there are betterSupermanbooks available.
  • The Meaning of Night: A Confession by Michael Cox is a book that I just couldn’t finish. I tried, but just couldn’t get past the first few chapters. It wasn’t bad, but never captured my attention.

The Fourth Realm Trilogy from John Twelve Hawks

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The Traveler, The Dark River and The Golden City are the 3 books in John Twelve Hawks Fourth Realm Trilogy. To start off, John Twelve Hawks is not the author’s real name. He is supposedly not a Native American. He possibly lives off the grid. There is very little known about him (or is it a her) and he likes it that way. Most interviews point out that he only talks to people through a satellite phone with a voice scrambler or via email channels. Needless to say the book deals with issues around privacy and living off the grid.

The Traveler starts off introducing us to the world. There are 3 groups of people who are fighting over the world: The Bretheren (or Tabula), Travellers and Harlequins.  The Travellers are people who can travel between worlds. They are generally people who can make large changes in society and attract many followers. Harlequins are warriors who are sworn to protect Travellers from the Bretheren. The Bretheren want to control people by instituting a Panopticon (a virtual prison where people can be monitored without them knowing when someone is watching them).

The motivations of the Bretheren are not well developed. It is unclear whether they want to protect people (from themselves and each other) or want to gain power and control people. They are written as the obvious villains and is my main issue with the book. There is no subtlety in their actions and little reasoning given on why they have their viewpoints.

Our story follows Maya, a Harlequin by birth, who renounced her upbringing and was left alone by the Bretheren. Maya gets dragged back into being a Harlequin to protect two brothers who are Travellers, Michael and Gabriel Corrigan. Michael is more interested in wealth and power and Gabriel is more aligned with the Travellers lifestyle. When the Bretheren come for them, Michael is grabbed while Gabriel escapes and finds Maya to protect him.

Michael learns what the Bretheren are up to and volunteers to help them out. With his Traveller ability he is able to slowly come to power within the Bretheren as he sees a path to money and power. Maya and Gabriel jump around the world trying to protect Gabriel, rescue Michael (until they learn he is helping the Bretheren) and make contacts with other Harlequins. As Maya and Gabriel start falling in love (a huge no-no for Harlequins), Gabriel starts gathering followers across the world.

Interspersed with this story are the attempts by both Michael and Gabriel to cross worlds (in a metaphysical way with leaving their bodies behind) and learn about what’s in the other realms. The Bretheren are interested because they are getting messages from an alien intelligence in another realm which is giving them technology that will help them build their panopticon. The Harlequins and Travellers are interested to protect themselves and to take down the Bretheren.

The books are entertaining and have some insight on privacy and regulation concerns. But the issues seem too one sided. They are well written, considering that these are the first published writing from the author and I wouldn’t be surprised if the author had published works under his real name.

Best Books of the 00’s

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As I did with the Best Books of 2009 post, I will be listing my 5 favorite books from the 00s in no particular order. Also some honorable mentions:

  • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke brought Victorian fantasy to the forefront and caused a mini rush of similar books (like The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes and Drood by Dan Simmons). The titular heroes of of the novel do battle in the field and in magical theory. Mr Norrell is the last of the magicians who uses his magical knowledge and ability to make his way into Victorian society. Then another magician appears, Jonathan Strange, who isn’t quite as skilled, but finds himself a student of Mr. Norrell. As Jonathan Strange’s abilities grow, he chafes under the tutelage of Mr Norrell and eventually breaks free. As the sorcerers clash in magical theory, the nation is divided between followers of the two great men.
  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon is a paean to the age of funnybooks. The days when Superman and Batman were new and fresh and everyone was trying to find a way to copy their success. Josef Kavalier is magician in training in Prague who gets a chance to escape to America to live with his aunt and cousin Sam Clay. Sam is a prospective writer/artist of pulp fiction and comics who sees Josef’s artistic ability as his way into his dream job. Sam and Josef come up with a comic book character The Escapist to wide acclaim. The book follows Sam and Josef from the mid 30s through the early 50s as the characters and their creation mature and lose everything that’s important to them.
  • Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold is a story of magic, love and television. In parallel stories, we find out the history of Charles Carter who falls in love with magic at a young age. While almost losing his dream, he his vaulted into the spotlight by Houdini and connected with his true love. Meanwhile Philo Farnsworth is trying to invent the television and fight off companies from stealing his invention. Throw in death of President Harding, Borax Smith, the Marx brothers and Max Friz (founder of BMW) and this is a magical journey through the turn of the century.
  • The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World) by Neal Stephenson must be read together (set aside some time for a 3000+ page trilogy) to be enjoyed. After the success of Cryptonomicon, Stephenson jumps back from the 20th Century to the late 17th century and tackles issues around the intersection of politics, technology and currency. 40 years of European history covering the great fire of London and the founding of the Royal Society are the backdrop for this story about the fight over the invention of calculus (Newton or Leibniz) and whether Isaac Newton is a proper master of the English Mint. There are a couple call backs to Cryptonomicon, but you don’t need to have read that book to enjoy these. It’s not an easy read and starts slow, but once it starts going, Stephenson does a masterful job of tying all the thread together.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Volume 1, Volume 2, The Black Dossier, Century 1910) by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill is a bit of a cheat. Alan Moore steals characters from everywhere and pulls them together into a wonderful set of pulp stories. The mythology is added to by the portraits of previous leagues which line the walls of the headquarters. The first volume introduces a cast of Victorian literature anti-heroes (including Captain Nemo, Alan Quartermain and the Dr. Jeckyll) who work for Mr Bond (their contact into the British government) who works for the mysterious Mr. M. Not only a wonderfully drawn and written set of stories, the in-jokes about the characters and their future fly freely as they capture anti-gravity rocks, protect London from invasion and gernally save the world.

Honorable Mention:

  • Anathem by Neal Stephenson is a peek at a math, based religious world that touches on a number of interesting concepts. The plot doesn’t start for 200 pages which allows plenty of time for world building
  • The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem touches on families in Brooklyn, art, comics and friendship. A wonderful book from an underappreciated author.
  • Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling is a children’s series that adult love about a wizard who is destined to save the world while learning how to cast a spell. The characterizations and interplay between the heroes elevate this series above the usual sorcery book.
  • The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon is a detective story set in Alaska after the Jewish state is created there (instead of Israel). A corpse sets off a murder mystery, but the real story is the Jewish state which is a temporary solution about to be ended.
  • Ragmop by Rob Walton is a mesmerizing combination of super villains, dinosaurs, physics, feminism, politics and Looney Tunes. It was started as a comic book in the mid 90s and then put on the shelf and completed in the mid 00s. So the politics start becoming more prominent over the last half of the story.

This post is part of the thread: BestOf – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Best book of 2009

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Or, more accurately, the best book that I read in 2009. There are a couple books published in 2009 which are still on my reading list, so it wouldn’t be fair to judge books published in 2009. Top 5, in no particular order:

  • Jack London in Paradise: A Novel – A novel about the last year in Jack London’s life set in Hawaii with actor/director Hobart Bosworth was our guide. From the author of The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, his second book is better written and executed, but not as much fun. Hobart Bosworth’s studio is in trouble and he needs a Jack London screenplay to save it. Only London is in Hawaii, dying and believes that Bosworth has stolen some money from him. Bosworth has to try to save London to save himself. Featuring many, many real-life people mixed with a wonderful take on Hawaiian history and Jack London.
  • Blood’s A Rover – The final book in James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. It has his best writing since LA Confidential, with a decrease in the short staccato sentences that made me dislike The Cold Six Thousand. Ellroy starts after the assassinations of RFK and MLK and finishes up with the 60s, taking us through the Nixon re-election and death of J. Edgar Hoover.  Now that Ellroy has dispensed with the 50s in LA, the 60s in USA, it makes us wonder what he’s going to do with the 70s and 80s. And also wonder how long we’re going to need to wait to find out.
  • The Domino Men by Jonathan Barnes is his second book and sequel to The Somnambulist. Well, not a direct sequel, but it features a mild mannered English clerk trying to stop a horrifying monster from taking over the world. It’s an urban horror novel that touches on British society and politics while scaring us as well.
  • Sunnyside is the second book (I’m seeing a pattern here) from Glen David Gold after his extremely enjoyable Carter Beats the Devil. Sunnyside starts with a (apparently real life) mass delusion of Charlie Chaplin being seen in over 800 places simultaneously on a Sunday in 1916 and takes Chaplin through WW1 and the rise of Hollywood. A parallel story has Leland Wheeler change his name to Lee Duncan who, while in France during WW1, found a couple puppies. Only one puppy survived and he went on to save Hollywood as Rin Tin Tin.
  • Asterios Polyp by comic book writer/artist David Mazzucchelli. Asterios Polyp is an architect who’s designs have won awards, but he’s never build a building. Wonderfully written and drawn.

I’ll be doing a best of the 00’s later, but I doubt any of these books will be on that list.

This post is part of the thread: BestOf – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Inherent Vice

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Inherent Vice is the latest novel from Thomas Pynchon and it’s probably his most accessible work (at least since The Crying of Lot 49.  I’d previously read The Crying of Lot 49 and V and started Gravity’s Rainbow at least 10 times (I made it as far as page 10 once), but this is a different Pynchon. Inherent Vice is James Ellroy on LSD with drug plots and kidnapping and local police up against the FBI and giant dentist conspiracies. If it sounds confusing, rest assured it is, but it’s still entry-level Pynchon.

Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello is a private investigator  who has moved up the chain from taking snapshots of cheating spouses to investigating missing people. When an ex-girlfriend comes in to ask for help with her married boyfriend, Doc finds himself getting involved in a bigger mystery then he signed up for. Police informants, a detective named Bigfoot, a brainwashing dentist cult, Vegas casinos and the beginning of ARPANET start getting involved as Doc gets almost as confused about what’s going on as we are.

As Doc starts finding out more about old friends then he wanted to, he has to start making decisions about which side he is on and which side he should be on. After Doc, his friends and the plot wind their way around the west coast, Pynchon winds everything up in a neat little pile and leaves the reader wondering what just happened. Inherent Vice is an entry point for readers who want to know if Pynchon is for them.

Avatar: A movie review

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Avatar is James Cameron’s latest over-budget, sure-to-bomb movie has made over $1 billion in the 3 weeks since it’s been released.It’s a special-effects breakthrough in technology, not just in the 3-D and computer generated people, but the world building on a scale that’s never been done before.

The basic plot is handicapped soldier gets brought to wild frontier planet to replace his scientific brother (who was killed in a random violence plot point). He has no scientific training, no background in the biology of the planet or training on what he is expected to do. So, of course he is thrown in because the Avatar (a human-alien hybrid clone of his brother who can be controlled by him due to the genetic similarity) is expense to create and transport across the galaxy. So, to get their money’s worth, Jake Sulley is thrown in with Ripley Grace’s scientific group to explore Pandora and the native intelligent species: the Na’vi. Colonel Quaritch, the HMFIC of security for the Earth base, sees a soldier who can be his mole into the Na’vi.

The rest of the movie plays out pretty much the way you expect, but no one is going to see this movie for the amazing plot. Having said that there are a couple things I want to touch on. First, Colonel Quaritch is arguably one of the least competent military leaders in recent movies. At no point during any of the battles does he attempt any strategy. Every attack is straight forward with no subtlety, no plans, no attempt to regroup and change tactics when the enemy comes up with unexpected defenses. His entire role in the movie is to get the helicopters in the right place for the dinosaur vs helicopter fight scene.

Second, why do the humans want the unobtainium from this location only. It appears to be free flowing with the hanging cliffs. And can’t they slant drill/mine? Go under and around the Na’vi tree to get the minerals they need? Have they tried negotiating with the Na’vi? I’m sure there is probably something they had the Na’vi wanted that would allow them limited access to a small area where they can mine the unobtanium to their heart’s delight. But that would have reduced the need for the battle scenes and that’s what the movie is focused on.

Having said all that. The plot was stupid and plain, but not ridiculous. There were no glaring holes making you wonder what was going on. There was no time during the movie that you didn’t know what the characters were doing. The dialogue was serviceable and helped move the plot along. Cameron will never win an Oscar for his writing, but it was strong enough to not confuse people.

What the movie is focused on is the scenery of Pandora and the dinosaurs vs technology fight scene. The visuals are amazing (especially in 3-D) and you can easily see where all the money was spent on this movie. And the money was well spent. This is a full-realized planet with it’s own wildlife, plantlife and geology. The visuals are amazing and I doubt I can do justice to them here. It is something that you do have to see for yourself.

Go see it for the amazing visuals (the technology of the visuals will surely find it’s way into other movies in the near future) and make sure you see it in 3-D.

The Eight by Katherine Neville

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The Eight is wonderful mix of Dan Brown and Umberto Eco, except that it predates either or them. Katherine Neville’s first novel is a wonderful trip through the French Revolution and the modern day (well 1970s) Middle East using a backdrop of chess and oil.

The book has two linked stories, one in the 1970s and one in the 1790s. The 1970s plot follows computer expert Catherine (Cat) Velis as she slowly finds herself in ensnared in a plot to recover a mystical chess board(the Montglane Service which used to be owned by Charlemagne) before the other side can. But the plot makes you work to find out who is on which side of the board. Is Cat the Black Queen or a simple pawn (who can cross the chess board to become a Queen or be easily disposed of).

In the mid 1970s, Cat finds herself on the outs with her consulting company boss and gets shipped off to Algeria to help with some oil activities (the start of OPEC). On her last week in New York, Lily (a chess loving daughter of a family friend) brings Cat to a chess match between two Soviet players. One is an over the hill player and the other is a prodigy who hasn’t been seen in years. When the over the hill player turns up dead in the men’s room, Cat starts finding herself in the middle of a mystery surrounding some ancient chess pieces which might be for sale in Algeria.

Meanwhile in the 1790s, two orphans (Mireille and Valentine), who were raised in a convent, are cast out along with all the other nuns to hide the secret of the Montglane Service. The Montglane Service is a mystical and powerful chess set once owned by Charlemagne. As the nuns leave the convent, Mireille and Valentine find themselves in Paris during the middle of the French Revolution and the abbess heads to Russia to find her lifelong friend Catherine the Great. Mireille finds herself involved with Napoleon, Voltaire, Talleyrand, Robespierre and Leonhard Euler as she struggles to help hide the chess set and find out who is trying to gain the power of the Montglane Service for themselves. Mireille’s diary links the two stories as Cat finds herself on the same path that Mireille took 200 years previously.

You can tell this is the author’s first novel, as she tries too hard at times to make the chess analogies with the characters as the same time they are popping up in the plot. This story predates Indiana Jones, Dan Brown and The Name of the Rose and you can easily see how they would not exist without The Eight.

In 2008, Neville released a sequel The Fire which has a similar plot and style, but not nearly the positive reviews.